
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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I UNITED STATES UF AMERICA. ^ 



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SPEECH 



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Maj. Gen. THOMAS EfffflG, Jr., 



OF KANSAS, 



MADE BEFORE TUE 



NATIONAL DELEGATE CONVENTION 



UNION SOLDIERS AND SAILORS. 



COOPER INSTITUTE, NEW YORK, 
July 4, 1868, 



'n..~-- .,.. 



KEPORTET) AXI) PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE CONVENTION. 



It 



or 

)IAJ. GEI. THOMAS EWIXG, Je., 

OF KANSAS, 

AT THE 

SOLDIERS' AND SAILOES'J^MTIOML CONVENTION, j 

AT 

COOPER II^STITUTE, 

JJJ'^r^ 4, 1S6S. 

EEPOllTED A>^D FUBLISHED BY OIlLEll OF THE COXVENTIOX. ■ 



3/r. Frcsident and Gentlemen of (he. Convention : 

I heartily thank you for the honor of being called upon 
to address this vast assemblage of soldiers and sailors — the 
largest ever gathered on the continent since the grand re- 
view in Washington, at the close of the war, of the victorious 
armies of the Potomac, of the Tennessee, and of Georgia. 
Of the comrades who separated then, and went each to his 
home and civic occupation, almost every regiment has here 
its representative. Why have we, soldiers and sailors, who 
are proud of our service for the Union, assembled here in 
delegate convention to plan the overthrow of that political 
party which administered tlie Government through the 
war, and the defeat for the Presidency of him wh.o was erst 
the leader of the Union armies? (Applause.) With your 



indulgence, I will endeavor briefly to give the reasons for 
our meeting, and our intended action. (Cries of " Go on.") 

On the 4th of July, three years ago, the war for the sup- 
pression of the rebellion had wholly ended. General Lee 
had surrendered to General Grant the Army of Northern 
Virginia, and its officers and men were plowing the fields of 
the Old Dominion, drenched with the blood and scorched by 
the fires of four years of devastating war. Joe Johnston 
had surrendered to Sherman (applause) the daring and stub- 
born trooj)S which our Western army had driven incli by 
inch from Belmont to Raleigh ; and Shelby*s frontier com- 
mand vvere scattered over the hemisphere from Montana to 
Brazil. (Laughter.) There was not in amis a Confederate 
soldier, mounted or on foot ; not a dockyard, fort, or arsenal, 
in v.'hich there was a rebel ship, cannon, or musket; not a 
rood of land on earth, or a foot of deck on sea, over which 
a Confederate banner waved. The last rebel privateers were 
beincr draus^ed for condemnation from the Indian Ocean and 
the North Pacific ; and the haughtiest leaders of the rebel- 
lion were wandering outcast over the earth, or seeking par- 
don of a President who w^as a noble type at once of the loyal 
Southerner they had hated, and the laboring white man they 
had despised. (Applause.) Never was there a rebellion 
more utterly overthrown, or a cause more hopelessly lost. 

The people of the Southern States, with wonderful 
promptness, quiet, and unanimity, submitted to the result. 
You all know it was commonly predicted and believed, North 
and South, that when the great armies of the Confederacy 
were conquered, dispersing, they would fill the land with 
guerrillas, and wage a Vendean warfare more destructive 
and irrepressible than the regular war out of which it grew. 
But this prediction was not in the smallest degree verified. 
Within sixty days after the last great battle of the war, the 
Federal marshals and tax-gatherers executed their processes 



unarmed and unattended throughout the Southern States, in 
the jungles lately swarming with guerrillas, and over fields 
lately shaken with the roar of rebel artillery. The whole 
people of the South bowed totha authority of the nation, with 
hearts in which, as they were human, there were yet doubt- 
less revenges and sorrows, humiliations and bereavements, 
and undying attachments to the cause they had dearly loved 
and bravely maintained, but which yielded implicitly all that 
the people, the President, or the war party had ever told 
them were the purposes of the war. And by the Constitu- 
tional Conventions and Legislatures, chosen by the electors 
of the Southern States the year the rebellion ended, their 
several constitutions and statutes were amended, abolishins: 
slavery and the harsh codes founded on it, abandoning the 
doctrine of secession, repudiating the rebel debt, recognizing 
the national debt, and, in short, giving every guaranty which 
men could give, that in a spirit of concord they recognized 
and accepted, as accomplished, every avowed object of the 
war. 

Now, the RepubUcan party was bound, injoyalty, honor, 
and good conscience, to accept this submission, and at once 
restore the Union by admitting the Southern States to repre- 
sentation, so far as they presented senators and representa- 
tives personally qualified. (Applause.) It was bound to do 
it, out of obedience to the Constitution, in the sacred name of 
which the war was waged, and which, while allowing each 
House to judge of the qualifications of its own members, 
prohibits the exclusion from representation of any State as a 
State. And it was bound to do it, because the war was 
avowedly waged for the sole purpose of effecting the uncon- 
ditional restoration of the Union, immediately upon the un- 
conditional submission of -the Southern people, through 
amendments of their constitutions and laws, to the national 
authority. Said Sherman to the South, in his Atlanta letter : 



" We don't want your negroes or your horses, your houses 
or your lands, or any thing you have ; w: onhj want, and ivill 
liave, a just ohcdiejice to the Constituiion and laivs of tha United 
States.^' (Applause.) And in that declaration he expressed 
the sole purpose of the war as declared by tlie Government, 
and understood by the army and navy and people -of the 
Union. The Republican party, in its National Convention 
in 1864 — just after Horace Greeley had tried to effect a dis- 
honorable peace through George N. Sanders and Beverly 
Tucker (hisses and laughter) — declared that the war was, 
and should be waged only, to force " an unconditional surren- 
der of hostility by the rebels, and a return to their just alle- 
criancc to the Constitution and laws of the United States." 
And from the beginning to the close of the war, there stood, 
and still stands, on our statute books, a law declaring that the 
war should be waged " in no spirit of oppression, but solely 
to restore the Union with all the dignity, equality, and 
rights of the several States unimpaired." (Applause.) That 
law was the pledge of the Republican party made in ISGl, 
and reiterated in National Convention in 1S64, that the tre- 
mendous powers confided to it by the people, without re- 
gard to party, for the vindication of the national authority, 
should never be used for party or sectional dominion. And 
on the faith of that pledge were given every dollar of money 
and every drop of blood spent in the war. (Applause.) 

But the Republican party had not the wisdom or patriot- 
ism to accept this submission of the Southern people, and 
promptly restore the Union. It recollected that before the 
war it was a minority party, and came into power, in 186 1, 
through a division of the Democratic party, by much less 
than half the popular vote. Yet, with the prestige and moral 
power resulting from a successful prosecution of the war, 
nd a prompt and cordial restoration of the Union, it could 
have retained power until this generation of voters had passed 



away or had forgotten the anti-war follies of the Democratic 
party. But it took counsel of its fears, doubted its own 
destiny, forgot the inextinguishable love in the hearts of the 
Northern people for the Constitution and the Union, and 
therefore refused to take what the war was alone waged to 
,o-et — a prompt and cordial pacification and reunion under 
the Constitution. It did this in the vain hope of controlling 
the Southern States by making voters of the negroes, and 
proscribing all the intelligent white m6n whom Congress and 
the Freedman's Bureau could not bribe, or coax, or kick, or 
cufF into Republicanism. But while destroying the ten 
Southern States, and building in their stead ten rotten bor- 
oughs, to be represented in Congress in the interests of the 
Northern radicals by white adventurers and plantation 
negroes, the party is losing its strong hold on the Northern 
States, and, like the dog in the fable, drops the substance to 
snatch at the shadow. (Laughter and applause.) 

The first step toward postponing reunion until the 
Southern States could be subjugated by the radical party, 
It was the offer, in ISGG, of the Constitutional amendment. It 
contained declarations of the results of the war, which the 
Southern States had already inserted in their constitutions 
and codes under the advice of President Johnson, and to 
which they freely assented ; and an alternative of negro 
suffrage or reduction of representation, and also important 
additions to the power of the Federal Government, to which 
they would have assented reluctantly for the sake of reunion. 
But, inseparably coupled with these, and making with them 
one proposition, which had to be accepted or. rejected as a 
v/hole, was the clause of disfranchisement, which they could 
not accept without dishonor. It disqualified from holding 
any office, petty or exalted, Slate or Federal, in effect, every 
man who was of age when the war broke cut and was fit to 
hold any office. So sweeping was, the proposed proscription, 



8 

that, after it was adopted into the reconstruction acts, Generals 
Meade, Schofield, and Canby successively reported that it was 
impossible to administer the governments of the Southern 
States while enforcing it^ because, in many communities, there 
was really not a man fit to hold any office who was not dis- 
qualified by it. The Southern people did as the radical 
leaders wished and knew they would — rejected the amend- 
ment. They acted like men.in doing so. (Applause.) Let us 
ask ourselves, gentlemen, whether, if the North had rebelled 
and been conquered, and the South had offi^red us reunion 
on condition that we should ourselves rote to disfranchise 
and degrade every Northern man who could read and write 
and cipher to the rule of three, as punishment for the rebellion 
in which all had participated, and to commit the government 
and destinies of our States to the hands of only the most 
ignorant of our people, or to the camp-followers of the con- 
quering army, we would have voted for our own disgrace and 
disfranchisement ? (Voices, " No, no.") No people who are 
fit to be free would thus with their own hands put on their 
.own necks the yoke of political slavery. (Great applause.) 
And so far from the rejection of that clause and the proposed 
amendment of the Constitution with which it was inseparably 
•connected, being a just cause of complaint against the 
Southern people, they would have merited the scorn and 
contempt of all high-minded men had they accepted it. 

But the amendment served its purpose in the campaign 
of 18G6. Ic was, to the careless or superficial observer^ an 
effort in good fiiith by the radical party to effect reunion. 
The Southern legislatures, unanimously and promptly, but 
•respectfully^ declared that they could not accept it ; and 
were therefore violently denounced by the radical press and 
orators, as still defiant and rebellious. Just then, the most 
mischievous men of both parties in New Orleans contrived 



9 

to bring on a bloody riot ; and tlie radicals rode the tempest 
it created, and swept the North. 

Since then, with three-fourths of both Houses of Congress 
on their side, and animated by a thorough contempt of the 
Constitution, the radi cal party has been omnipotent. It 
has protracted disunion nearly as long as the rebels did — and 
done more to destroy our form of Government than all the 
parties that ever controlled its destines. 

On the Stli of July, 1SG3, in a debate in the House of 
Representatives, Old Thad Stevens (hisses) bluntly and boldly 
announced the doctrine that the Southern States were not 
States of the Union, and that Congress could legislate over 
them as over conquered territory. If this doctrine be true 
it is because the acts of secession were constitutional, and 
in legal effect took the States out of the Union — that is, that 
under the Constitution, the States had a right to secede, and, 
therefore the United States had no right to make war on them 
for seceding. This rebel doctrine, when thus announced by 
Stevens, was violently assailed by Owen Lovejoy, and other 
fierce radicals of the House, and repudiated in the name of 
the war party. 

In the year following, in the National Union Convention 
at Baltimore, Stevens again proclaimed this doctrine, declar- 
ing that Tennessee was but a subject province, and Andrew 
Johnson an alien enemy. But the Convention contemptu- 
ously repudiated his theory, and gave emphasis to iis dec- 
laration by nominating Mr. Johnson for Vice-President, and 
indorsing Mr. Lincoln's reconstruction policy. All this, 
however, was while the war was going on, and while soldiers 
were being called for to fight in the holy cause of the Con- 
stitution and the Union, and not for conquest. (Applause.) 
But when the i ebellion ended, and the elections of 1SC6 gave 
the radicals a new lease of power, this infamous dogma, 
which, if true, makes the war for secession Constitutional 
and just, and the war for the Union a wicked and unprovoked 



10 

conquest — a doctrine, which three years before had bsen, 
like the hateful Richard — 

" Sent before its time, 
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, 
And that so lamely and unfashionable. 
That dogs barked at it as it halted by them," 

was now adopted by the Republican party as the funda- 
mental theory of reconstruction and the shibboleth of loy- 
edty. 

Having fully adopted this rebel theory that the Southern 
States were out of the Union, and unsheltered by the broad 
argisofthe Constitution, Congress declared invalid the govern- 
ments chosen by the electors of thoseStates under the advice of 
Presidents Lincoln and Johnson, in conformity with State con- 
stitutions and laws, and established over them military dicta- 
torships, through which to inaugurate the rule of the negroes 
and their Northern allies. J3ut here a new rent in their pro- 
gramme was discovered, requiring to be patched by a newly- 
invented dogma. The Calhoun-Stevens theory of the validity 
of secession was good as far as it stretched ; but, like a 
shelter tent, was neither broad nor long enough. It took 
the States out, and made them conquered provinces, but did 
not increase the power of Congress, nor deprive the inhabi- 
tants of the conquered territory of those guaranties of life, lib- 
erty, and property which the Constitution extends to citizens 
and aliens alike on every foot of ground within the jurisdiction 
of the United States — the right of exemption from punishment 
by ex 'post facto laws; the liberty of speech and of the press ; 
the right to keep and bear arms; the right to be free from 
unreasonable searches and seizures, and from deprivation of 
life, liberty, or property without due process of law ; the 
right of trial by jury; and, above all, the privilege of the 
writ of habeas corpus — that shiehl of liberty, in possession of 



11 

which the people of a monarchy are free, and without which 
a Republic is a despotism. (Great applause.) These consti- 
tional guaranties were in the way of coercive'reconstruction ; 
and Congress was forbidden, in peace, to touch any one of 
them. Unless these ancient and sacred liberties could be 
destroyed, vigorous military despotisms could not be estab- 
lished — and without such despotisms, radical reconstruction 
was impossible. While these guaranties remained in the 
Constitution, and were obeyed, the whole governing talent 
of the South could not be disfranchised by a sweeping ex yost 
facto law : Governors of States duly chosen by the electors 
in accordance with State constitutions and laws could not 
be removed by district commanders as impediments to re- 
construction ; State legislatures could not be prorogued at 
the point of the bayonet ; State treasuries could not be 
robbed, and widow and orphan creditors defraude-d of their 
dividends to pay plantation negroes eight dollars a day for 
making constitutions (Applause.) New codes of laws, 
framed by Solons and moralists like Dan Sickles (hisses), 
could not be proclaimed and enforced over the Carolinas : a 
Judge conducting a murder trial could not be pushed from 
the bench, and the trial carried on to conviction, sentence, 
and execution, by a colonel in uniform ; American citizens 
— citizens of one of the original thirteen States, chapged 
with no crime, could not be arrested by scores, on letti-cs de 
cachet signed by a posi-adjutant, immured in loathsome dun- 
geons, and tortured to t\\Q point of death with the boot and 
sweat box, to make them swear to what a military com- 
mander suspected they knew touching the murder of some 
wretch like Ashburn (applause) ; and military commissions, 
those courts, organized to convict, at whose doors no man 
can lay a charge of uncertainty as to the law, or doubt or 
delay or undue clemency in its execution, which adopt the 



IS 

efficient rule that it is better that ninetj'-nine innocent men 
should be punished, than one guilty man escape, could not 
inspire respect *for the radical party and its measures by 
being prepared at a moment's warning to try any citizen for 
any act, which in the opinion of the officer convening the 
court, was a *' crime against reconstruction," and to sentence 
him for months, or years, or life, to the dungeon or the Dry 
Tortugas, beyond the reach of Executive pardon or reprieve. 
It was indispensable, therefore to get rid of these constitu- 
tional provisions, which are at once guaranties of the liberties 
of the people, and prohibitions of power to Congress. To 
avoid an avowal of a purpose to trample on the Constitution, 
the party, with decent hypocrisy, claimed a new derivation 
of Congressional power. They said that a formidable rebel- 
lion was never contemplated by the framers of the Constitu- 
tion, and no powers were conferred^in anticipation of such an 
emergency. Congress, therefore, was compelled, in the 
matter of reconstruction, to act outside of the Constitution. 

The framers of the Constitution were the sons and grand- 
sons of the Puritans and the Cavaliers who kept England 
smoking with civil wars for half a century (applause) : and 
who knew by personal experience how despotic was power 
when inflamed by the passions of domestic war — whether 
thatf power were the legitimate Sovereign, the Pretender, or 
Parliament. And with recollections of this recent English 
history, and traditions of family persecutions, fresh in their 
minds — anticipating that the bold spifit of their sons would 
be transmitted to their children, and break out in occasional 
revolts against the national authority — the framers of the 
Constitution not only withheld from Congress the power ot 
inflicting, in peace punishments at will for political offenses, 
but also inserted those guaranties of personal liberty ex 
indusiria, as express prohibitions, in order to prevent a 
Congress driving the people to renewed war, or to flight by 



13 

measures of revenge such as sent their forefathers from 
England to our shores. (Great applause.) 

As to Congress deriving power in any contingency 
outside of the Constitution, it is enough to say that Congress 
gets all its powers from the Constitution, and outside of it 
has no powers, and is no Co7igrcss (applause) : and that all its 
acts not authorized by the Constitution, are mere usurpa- 
tions, whether against express prohibitions or not. If you 
present this argument to radicals, they will reply that the 
Constitution in not giving Congress such authority, is therein 
defective, and Congress needs, and must exercise it. A 
French philosopher once propounded to Professor Faraday, 
a new theory of the transmission of light : which the English 
philosopher heard patiently and then objected to it, that the 
theory was inconsistent with certain established facts of 
natural science. " So much ze worse for ze facts^'' was the 
ready answer of the confident Frenchman. So, if you 
prove the reconstruction plan unconstitutional, the radicals, 
in effect, answer, " So much the worse for the Constitution.^'' 
(Great applause.) 

Thus, to secure a reconstruction giving the radicals of 
the North absolute control of the ten States of the South, not 
only were the State governments abolished and military des- 
potisms built on their ruins, but every revered guaranty of 
life, liberty, and p4-operty, which the Southern people and 
ourselves inherited from a free ancestry, and which our fore- 
fathers and their forefathers placed in the Constitution to be 
beyond the reach of the rude hand of iliction, was boldly 
destroyed. No civilized people on this earth are as wholly 
without legal protection from the capricious oppression of 
their rulers as the Southern people under these military des- 
potisms. It is amazing how passively the people, Nortli and 
South, have borne this gross, dangerous, insolent usurpation. 
But it has been quietly submitted to because of the belief — 



14 . 

now, thank God! almost certainty — that the Northern people 
will, in November, seize this radical party and its half-exe- 
cuted usurpations, and dash them to pieces (prolonged cheer- 
ing) ; and because many of the military commanders have 
tempered the harsh rule they were sent to inflict out of that 
love for our ancient liberties which is born in every true 
American, and which so shone through the administration of 
at least one of those commanders as to cover with new 
and fadeless glory the twice-illustrious name of Hancock. 
(Tumultuous cheering and waving of hats.) 

Gentlemen, I do not understand how any white Ameri- 
can, proud of our race and of our free systems of govern- 
ment, can behold, without mingled disgust and indignation, 
the methods and results of Congressional reconstruction, and 
the pretenses by which it is sustained. It is claimed to be 
in the interests of iieace — while fomenting deadly strife and 
rancor between the two races, arraying them into conflicting 
parties, subjecting the superior to the inferior, and then 
leaving them to struggle for dominion ! In the interest of 
libertij and inogrcss — while tearing down ten free, enlightened 
States, four of the old thirteen that founded the Repubhc, 
and establishing in their stead ten despotisms, in which the 
intelligent and cultivated white man is made subject to the 
ignorant and brutal negro — despotisms mitigated only by the 
fact that the negroes are but the ostensible rulers of the 
Southern- whites, while the Northern radicals are the real ones 
that the negro acts only the part of the aidomaton chess- 
player, while the Northern radical party is the unseen intel- 
lect which directs the senseless hand that fingers the pawns. 
It is claimed toi)e in the interests o{ national prosj^rinj — while 
wasting the wealth and paralyzing the industries of the South 
on the one hand, and doubling the burdens of the Northern 
taxpayers and destroying the eager markets for their manu- 
factures and breadstuff's on the other. What a spectacle for 



15 

gods and men does not this reconstruction present! See tlie 
black laborers of the South, fed in idleness out of moneys 
wrung from the toil of Northern white men (applause), filled 
with ambition to rule the whites, and to grow rich by con- 
fiscations, and becoming each year more utterly and irre- 
ciaimably idle and thriftless. The splendid sugar, cotton, 
a-nd rice plantations, at once the evidence and the product of 
a century of civilization, overgrown with weeds ; idle ma- 
chinery rusting in the sugar-houses ; the floods of the Missis- 
sippi sweeping over neglected levees and abandoned planta- 
tions, and the boorish negro field-hands sitting in conven- 
tions ! Behold Virginia, the Niobe of States, the mother of 
Presidents and illustrious statesmen — her at whose call our 
great free Republic was formed — her by whose free gift the 
Republic acquired the territory of the six great States of the 
Northwest ! See the civil government founded by her 
Washington (applause), Madison (applause), Jefferson (ap- 
plause), Lee (applause), the foremost statesmen of their day 
on the earth, destroyed, supplanted by a military despotism, 
and that, in turn, about to be supplanted by a civil government 
framed by infamous whites like Hunnicutt, and a rabble of 
half-civilized negroes (hisses). If this be prosperity, progress, 
and liberty, God send us misfortune, reaction, and despotism 
forever! (Prolonged applause.) 

The radicals endeavor to smooth the hideous visaije of 
this reconstruction by asserting that it is indispensable to 
prevent the Democracy getting power and repudiating the 
National debt. In other words, to prevent repudiation, some 
device must be arranged by which a majority of the legal 
electors of ten states shall not be permitted to rule 
them. If that necessity really exists, the dire event can not 
be long postponed by devising in the interest of the national 
creditors, a scheme of reconstruction which violates the Con- 
stitution and the fundamental theo)y of our government ; 



16 

breaks pledges of infinitely more sacred obligation than the 
money debt ; cripples every industry of the land, and while 
reducing one-half every man's ability to pay taxes, doubles 
his share of thepubllcburden — the essential condition of which 
scheme is to the perpetuation of the rule of a party which now 
represents not one-third of the white people of the nation. 
But, thank God, that necessity does not exist ! The credit of 
the Republic, as the union of the States, rests secure in the 
hearts o/thc i^co^fle. (Applause.) A vast majority of all parties 
will preserve and defend it, as they did the Union. But if 
the national credit could be shaken, it would be by the pub- 
lic creditors flocking into one party, and, under the panoply 
of the national honor, scheming to perpetuate the power of 
that party at the cost of the established Constitutions and 
liberties of the States and the nation. (Great applause — 
cries of " That's so.") 

To accomplish this scheme of reconstruction, the Consti- 
tution is not only abrogated so far as the Southern States are 
concerned, but the form of our government is being de- 
stroyed by the absorptiorf by Congress of the chief powers of 
the National Executive : 

Congress has assumed to take from the President the con- 
trol of the army which the Constitution gives him, and to com- 
mit tliat part of it employed in the South to General Grant and 
five district commanders (hisses), independent of the orders of 
the President. By this bold assumption of power, it has con- 
verted many high officers of the regular army to radicalism, 
and made them zealous instruments of its usurpations. 

It has usurped the pardoning power, which the Consti- 
tution gives solely to the President, and by sweeping bills of 
pains and penalties, proscribed the intelligent white men of 
the South, notwithstanding the pardons of the President. 
And it now shamelessly avows that itj will give congressional 
'pardon only totliose who eat the leek o^ radicalism. (Hisses.) 



17 



All such are loyaU though, like Governor Brown, of Georgia, 
they drove and dragged their people into rebellion, and, cow^- 
ard-like, seized our arsenals and navy yards while yet wear- 
ing the mask of loyalty ; while men like George W. Jones, 
of Tennessee, who stood by the Union from the first, but 
who opposed negro suffrage and white disfranchisement, are 
stigmatized as '■^heart malignants,''^ deserving only proscription 
at the hands of the Sumners, and Kellys, and Butlers of Con- 
gress — (Great hisses. Cries, " Who stole the spoons?" 
"Dutch Gap.") 

" Those pseudo privy-councilors of God, 
"Who write down jadgments with a pen hard-nibbed." 

It took, too, from the President, the power of removal, 
thus fomenting insubordination in the civil service as it had 
done in the military — prohibiting even the removal of his own 
cabinet officers, the adjutants through whom he gives orders 
and receives reports. 

And it crowned its usurpations by an impeachment 
founded on a statute it had passed, enacting the glaring and 
flagitious lie that it is a high crime for the President to dis- 
charge the duties of removal imposed on him by the Consti- 
tution, as interpreted by the uniform usage of government 
from the administration of Washington down (applause) ; or 
even to so far attempt to exercise it, as to bring the question 
of his Constitutional power of removal to decision by the Su- 
preme Court — that high arbiter fixed by the Constitution to 
settle every conflict over boundaries of power between the 
States and the United States, or between departments of the 
general government. And, after having impeached him, 
and while giving him a lynch-law trial, the party, with a 
ferocity unparalleled even in the violent contro\^ersies of the 
day, brought its almost irresistible power to bear through its 
leading men, its press, and its conventions, to force Repub- 



.18 

lican Senators to commit moral perjury by an insincere ver- 
dict. So foul an act was never before attempted by a party 
in this nation. 

Had Andrew Johnson consulted his own interests, and 
become the instrument of a lawless faction, these essential 
executive powers would not have been disturbed, nor he ar- 
raigned as a criminal at the bar of the Senate. But, to his 
eternal renown (applause), he stood by the Coustitutioa when 
it v^as assailed by his party, as boldly and grandly as he had 
stood by the Union when the storm of war burst over and 
around it : 

"Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, 
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal ; 
Nor number nor example with liira wrought, 
To swerve from truth or change his constant mind." 

[Three cheers for Andrew Johnson. Three cheers for 
President Johnson. Tumultuous cheering.] 

Gentlemen, in any government but ours, usurpations so 
flagrant and fundamental would result in revolution ; in burs 
they can be overthrown by the people at the baliot box. 
The appeal to the people this fall will decide whether the 
radicals shall retain or surrender the power tliey have thus 
used, and are using, for the destruction of the Union and of 
our form of National Government. 

If we could so take our appeal as to present to the people 
the living issues between the parties free from the rubbish of 
past issues, who could doubt the result? If the Democracy 
could give us a candidate who would unite as thoroughly the 
opponents of radical rule as General Grant unites its sup- 
porters, that candidate would carry nine-tenths of the elec- 
toral college. (Applause.) The strength of the radicals is not 
in their cause, but in the divisions of their adversaries. 

The war was a success — not a failure. It settled the 
theretofore disputed and doubtful question of secession 



19 



against the right to secede. It settled, too, the subject of 
slavery. (Applause.) These, however, were unsettled|questions 
in 1S64, and' were thought to be involved in the political 
contest of that year. Now, the passions of the war and of 
that political controversy are not as dead as these issues in 
which they played their part. From them came all the 
hopes of the radicals, and ^11 the fears of the friends of the 
Constitution and the Union. Rousing these slumbering pas- 
sions of the war, and led on by one of its foremost generals, 
the radicals hope to fight over again the political battle of 
1864. Shall they do it ? ^ No, no.") Ah, gentlemen, I wish 
this convention could decide that question— but it is for the 
Democratic Convention to decide. By its choice of leader 
it will determine the battle-ground, and decide whether the 
Democracy shall triumph on living issues or be routed on 
dead ones (A[.plause) ; whether the radicals shall be arraigned 
and tried for what they are doing, or the Demon-acy , for what they 
did or failed to do four years ago ? 

Of a million and a half of present voters who served in 
the Union army or navy, this Convention represents at least a 
half. js (Voices, "More than one-half,'^ '* Two-thirds," "Three- 
fourths.") Of these so represented, a half or more (among 
whom I wish to be reckoned as one) will support any of the 
Democrats whose names have been mentioned for the Presi- 
dency ; but the remainder, numbering several hundred thou- 
sand voters, will be won or lost to the cause, as the nomina- 
tion proves wise or otherwise. (Laughter and applause.) 
This Convention has assembled in no spirit of dictation, but 
animated by de votion to the Constitution and the Union, and 
kindness to all who would preserve them, to aid in securing an 
harmonious nomination, and organizing a certain victory. I 
can not sufler myself to doubt that the Democratic party has 
assembled this day in the same patriotic spirit„and will pre- 
sent a candidate who, whetiier he fought for the Union or 
not, thoroughly sustained the war (great applause), and 



20 

whom all the soldiers and sailors of the Union can support 
without even seeming inconsistency. 

The Republican party represents no principle for which 
we fought. We thought not of negro suffrage (applause and 
cries of " No, no"), or of white disfranchisement ; of forcing 
on the Southern States unequal fellowship in the Union 
(" Never, never"), of changing our beneficent form of govern- 
ment ("No, never"), or of perpetuating the Republican 
party (" Never, never"). Out of the five hundred thousand of 
Union soldiers, Democrats and Republicans, who sleep on 
fields washed by the waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf, not 
one laid down his life for any such end. Of the fifteen hun- 
dred thousand of their surviving comrades, not one will say 
he would have risked his life for either of these objects. And 
these measures of the Republican party are not only not the 
objects of the war, but are so prosecuted as to defeat those 
objects, and to inflict on the nation evils as great as those the 
war was waged to prevent. (Shouts, " That's so.") 

The Democratic party is now the only party true to the 
Constitution^and the Union. (Applause.) If we would accom- 
plish the purposes of our service and sacrifice, if we would 
save the Union, the States, their liberties, and laws, we must 
unite with the Democracy. (Long continued applause.) We 
must not ask what men have heen, but what they are ; not 
who lately defended the Constitution, but who now defend if. 
(Great applause.) In the path which the Democratic party 
treads, we see the footprints of Washington, JetFersou, Madi- 
son, Adams, and all the heroes of the revolution ; of Webster, 
Jackson, Clay, Wright, and all the giants of the genei'ation 
just gone before us ; and while it keeps that line of march, 
and bears the flag of the Constitution and the Union, we 
can follow it with pride and with unfaltering trust. (Immense 
applause, cheers, and waving of hats, followed by the band 
playing " Rally round the flag.") 



